The central blog for all things John Barnes (science fiction writer, theatre historian, marketing intel math guru, and other stuff) where you can find his musings, maunderings, and misapprehensions. Links and posts here lead to many other areas of Barnesian activity.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The Hobo Queen of the Sciences

Long ago, I had given an assignment in an advanced
rhetoric/speech class: a two-minute speech to explain a judgment using one fact
and one enthymeme.* The gist of the assignment was, just for two minutes, reason
in public like an adult who respects the listeners.

It was early in the term so I got the inevitable few who
treat all assignments as unrelated checklists. "For my judgment I don't drink no more. For my fact hydrogen is the lightest
element and it is a colorless gas.
For my enthymeme I picked analogy."

I got the solid many who struggled bravely and sort of got
to about where you can expect a college sophomore to get. "I believe that
marijuana should be treated like alcohol or tobacco because in this study they
like, they have numbers, and the numbers are like, alcohol causes twenty
thousand dollars of health damage per person and tobacco causes like one
hundred thousand and marijuana causes only eight thousand, those are all
lifetime I guess and I'm not sure what they counted, but anyway eight thousand
is like way lower, so it should be treated the same."

With many weeks to go in the term, this could be improved on
considerably, and nearly always was.

And then I got Ms. Pounding Shouter.

The issue, if I remember right, was gun control (and I only
remember that because a year before I'd had to deal with a disturbed but
probably not dangerous student bringing a gun to class) and I honestly don't
recall which side she was on. She
thumped the podium, she pointed at people and accused them of not understanding
her**, she ordered them to believe what she told them to.

Afterward, when I met with her for the inevitable "we
need to talk" hour, I started off by asking what she thought she was
doing.

"Well, I was the only one in the room doing it
right."

Hmm. Please explain.

"Enthymemes are logic, right? You say that in class over and over."

Indeed, I do. (Note
to self: perhaps I am saying it so often that some people are becoming
unhinged?) So what enthymemes did you think you used?

"Logic."

Logic?

"I was totally
logical. I pointed things out real loud and told people they were dumb
if they didn't believe it, and I yelled so they'd get the point."

We went around that a bit. The breakthroughs to understanding came via the enthymeme of
analogy: "Enthymemes are specific forms of logic, like arithmetic
procedures are forms of mathematics.
If I had you doing a long division problem, and instead you tried to add
the two numbers, you wouldn't get off the hook by telling me that long division
was mathematics and you used mathematics.
But in fact this is a step further away; it's as if you put all the
digits in alphabetical order, which isn't even mathematics. So now we have to build our way back
in, getting a handle on what logic is so that you can see what enthymemes
are."

But the important thing is, she did break through.

Oddly enough, she finished the course with a passing grade,
and did seem to acquire a better handle on the world around her over time. I never did hear where she'd acquired
the idea that logic consisted in sounding like a middle-aged man with an unfair
parking ticket, but after that bad start she pulled things around and caught up
with commendable speed (which I ascribe to commendable effort, but maybe she
was just smart-but-lost). Again,
the main reason I remember that is that it was dramatic; the poised and
competent young woman who walked out of the last class was not much like the
unfocused and scattered one that walked into the first one.***

My private, personal, and not evidentially-founded-at-all
guess is that so many people use "logical" to mean "agrees with
me" that it's no surprise that their kids pick it up, and it certainly
does go a long way toward explaining why, for example, you can hear loud arguments
in which both people say they're being logical, but by that one person means
"I am loudly repeating talking points from my side" and the other
means "I am keeping an even tone of voice." Google "logical" and "blog", skip the
first 100 or so hits, and, if we accept John Stuart Mill's description of
logical exposition as allowing us to proceed by smooth gradations to
understanding—sort of logic as the fresh-paved interstate for the minivan of
the mind—you will have found yourself Baja in a windstorm.

Which leads me to the melancholy thought that I caught and
fixed one case of the problem in several years of teaching. How many are there like her that no teacher caught?

Worse still, how many teachers are there like that?

More than a few, to judge by the amount of unnecessary
hollering, hectoring, scolding, and bellowing that go on in some classrooms,
especially in poor areas where parents rarely complain and don't have much idea
about what should be happening in a classroom. Also, no matter what you hear from the ed department
(Federal or your local college) and the teacher's unions, there are a
disproportionate number of intellectually less-than-stellar students in
education programs, and some of them do graduate (and end up teaching in
schools where there are poor defenses against them).

Furthermore, the bellowers, posturers, chest-beaters, and
order-snappers very often have an enthusiastic following among adults who are
more concerned with order than learning, either because they see repression as
a way to express their loathing for both kids and learning simultaneously; or
because their model of learning is bound up in their model of submission; or,
if you are the principal, because at least that's one damned room you never
have to call the police about.

Last and far from least, in a related course where I used to teach listening for
logic as a way of improving listening comprehension and retention****, one
student asked me at the end of the class, "Why wasn't I taught this in
fourth grade?"

And unfortunately, I can think of at least ten reasons (if
I'm not restricted to good ones):

So
your old man wouldn't belt you when you noticed his illogic and
"talked smart" to him.

So
your mother wouldn't send you into therapy because you kept telling her
that she didn't make any sense.

So
when you hit puberty you'll be susceptible to peer pressure, advertising,
and pop culture in general, and thereby fit in and be well-adjusted.

So you
won't get ideas about living differently from your parents, neighbors, or
peers, and be able to evaluate those ideas rather than just see if the
community likes them.

So you
won't remember stuff from one teacher's class and ask about it in another
and cause friction.

So
you'll believe what your parents' preferred authority tells you.

So you
won't learn stuff too fast in future classes, get bored, and cut up to
relieve the boredom.

So
you'll vote, pray, and buy predictably.

Just to point out a tiny little personal example: I lived in
Gunnison County, Colorado, for some years. The population is so small that almost everyone does some
jury duty every year*****, but every time I was called, as soon as it was noted
that I taught courses in logic and reasoning, bye-bye. Lawyers did not want that sort of
person on the jury.

Logic, I think – particularly informal logic, which speaks
in tones of probability and support, not certainty and proof -- is probably, like its
sometime-friend truth, going to be "ever a refugee from the camp of
victory." Unlike truth, it is
apt, also, to be "ever a refugee from the camp of defeat." That, by the way, is the enthymeme of
dissociation: the argument that if the outcomes are the same—i.e. that logic
may be the queen of the sciences, but she is eternally a hobo queen—the input
is irrelevant.

§

A later note: To my deep surprise, this "throwaway" piece is one of the most popular ever on the blog, and there were some reader questions about how logic could be taught in the schools as part of the basic curriculum. I tried to supply a few answers to those questions in Sneaking the Hobo Queen Into School.

§

*Enthymemes, in informal logic, are the recurrent structures
we use for hooking a fact to a judgment; some of the common ones are analogy,
numeric comparison, definition, example, generalization, and so on. Depending on which modern rhetoricians
you like, there are somewhere between about 16 and 25 of them, and they are the
elements, building blocks, alphabet, or whatever analogy you like of everyday
reasoning. Enthymemes are about as relevant to supporting a point logically as
a bolt, screw, or bracket is to supporting a shelf.

**that accusation was true for everyone in the room, I'm
sure, but it was definitely not their fault.

***and if you don't understand why I'd remember that for 20
years, well, you've either never been a teacher, or you shouldn't have been.

****It works, by the way.

*****since it takes 12 jurors to jail one drunk-ass
loudmouth Texas hunter who loves private property so much that he can't wait to
trespass on it shoot whatever his sozzled brain "thought" was an elk